Michael Deacon watches the Health Secretary answer - in his own special way -
an Urgent Question about overcrowding in A&E wards.

Say what you like about Jeremy Hunt – and people usually do – but you have to admit that the Health Secretary has an inventive mind.

This afternoon he was answering an Urgent Question about the crisis in A&E wards. At least, he was meant to be answering it. But instead his response consisted largely of questions. Why hadn’t Labour done better while in power? Would Andy Burnham, the Shadow Health Secretary, take responsibility for the NHS’s “targets culture”? Would Mr Burnham take responsibility for the NHS’s IT failures? Would Mr Burnham…?

Losing patience, the Speaker broke in. “For the avoidance of doubt,” he said witheringly, “the responsibility of the Right Honourable Gentleman is to answer questions, not to ask them.”

Lesser politicians would have been crushed by this rebuke. But not Mr Hunt. His extraordinary mind, agile as a mountain goat, had alighted on the perfect justification.

Answering in a questioning way. The brilliance of it. He was answering – he just happened to be doing so with questions, that was all. Simple as that. Answering in a questioning way.

A pedant might argue that the questions Mr Hunt was answering with had nothing to do with the question he’d been asked – i.e., the one about the crisis in A&E wards. But that would be splitting hairs. Come on. Give the man a break. He was only trying to answer in a questioning way.

With a mind as ingenious as his, there probably isn’t a tight spot in the world that Mr Hunt couldn’t explain his way out of.

Imagine what he must have been like at school. “Of course I wasn’t copying Smith’s answers, sir. I was simply reading them over his shoulder to make sure he hadn’t copied mine. And by the looks of it I rather fear he has.”

Imagine if he’d been a thief. “Of course I wasn’t robbing this house, officer. I was simply helping these good people by transferring their most valuable possessions somewhere more secure. Such as my house. Or the local pawn shop.”

Imagine if he were your husband. “Of course I didn’t forget it was your birthday, darling. I simply wanted to give you a special surprise. The surprise being that you received my present, card and birthday greeting two days after your actual birthday.”

Mr Hunt is, in short, a man with an answer to everything. Even if sometimes that answer sounds less like an answer and more like a question.

For some reason, however, the Speaker did not seem impressed by Mr Hunt’s ingenuity. “Order! I told the Secretary of State what the position is! It’s not for argument or debate!”

And so, cruelly, Mr Hunt was forced to answer the question about A&E wards without asking questions of his own. Instead, he had to answer it by answering it.

The tragedy for original thinkers is that their genius is so rarely recognised in their own time.